A Quick Note on Click-Through Rates

Just in case you didn't already know, we manage the Google AdWords campaigns for a lot of clients. These campaigns get a much higher click-through rate than banner advertising. Banners are much-vaunted for their branding abilities, and while research on that is mixed, that's not the issue here. We're looking at click-through rates from Google campaigns. And I just want to tell you a few of the figures that we're seeing from our work with clients.

Click-through rate [definition] is basically the percentage of people who saw your ad that actually clicked on it to visit your site. Banner advertising click-through rates have settled at 0.2% or thereabouts - this equates to roughly two people clicking on your ad for every thousand that see the ad.

To calculate a click-through rate, you divide the number of clicks by the number of 'views' (also called 'impressions') of the ad. Views/Impressions is the number of times an ad is viewed by internet users.

So, if your ad is seen 100 times and 2 people click on it, that's a click-through rate of 2%. If 8 people clicked out of 100, it's 8%. If 1,000 people viewed the ad and 22 people clicked on it, that's a click-through rate of 2.2%.

Now, onto blowing our trumpet. Only joking. These are actual figures from client campaigns. Let's go:

• 18.3% for a popular mis-spelling of a client's brand name. 173,000 views, 32,000 clicks.
• Exactly 17% for a targeted keyword. 600,000 views of the ad, over 100,000 clicks. Irish users only.
• 15.4% for the keyphrase "mortgages ireland".
• 14.8% for an extremely popular autos search term. Irish only.
• 12.4% for a business-to-business technology operation offering a free white paper for download as a sales leads gatherer.
• 9.9% over three years for an extremely popular hotel term, targeted to US and UK users.

Checking actual conversion rates [define] on each of these terms shows an average of 4.1%, from a low of 2.9% to a high of 11.2%.

This is hard proof that online is working for a wide variety of industries. In terms of actual business, each of these clients is adding to their bottom line by investing in online marketing.

Comments

[Dominic]

Banners don't need the higher click-through rate if the objective is branding. I know you've covered that in the previous blog entry, but just to remind new readers!

[Charlie]

Pity we can't get the banner click rate up that high!